Nicola Arnoldi shares his journey into cloud networking in this blog post. For Nicola, this isn’t a hard break into a brave new networking world, rather an extension of all that has come before. This started during network disaggregation planning while working at a large telco, but really accelerated as Nicola started getting comfortable with automation. He sees the hardest part for a lot of network engineers on this journey is being able to trust a lot of the cloud networking abstractions, rather than worrying about all the underlying specifics. We’re glad that Nicola’s conversations with Ivan Pepelnjak at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe a few years ago was considered a significant milestone on his journey with cloud networking.
A Cloud-Native NOS, at Last!
Nicola Arnoldi was excited to hear form Snaproute at Networking Field Day last week. That’s because the company demoed their CN-NOS (Cloud Native NOS) for the first time. This uses a Kubernetes-API-centric approach to attempt to breakdown the wall between NetOps and DevOps. Nicola thinks this is as much a cultural as a technical divide, but CN-NOS provides a compelling tool to get everyone speaking on the same terms.
GraphDBs and Network Automation
In this post Nicola Arnoldi clears up some confusion. For him, when network automation is vital for any organization, it’s important to keep in context what things like Ansible are. This isn’t SDN or an orchestration framework. Instead, taking a cue from Ansible’s recent Networking Field Day presentation, this is just one tool to accomplish automation. These kind of tool are perfect for building a Graph DB of your network resources. This is what underlies Apstra’s intent-based networking, as demoed at Networking Field Day last year.
NFD 18 – Day 2 – RedHat Ansible
Nicola Arnoldi clears up any confusion around what Ansible is and what it is not, relaying what he heard from their Networking Field Day presentation earlier this month. He makes it clear that Ansible is not SDN, nor an orchestrator, but just a powerful tool in your networking toolbox. He goes on to discuss the Ansible Network Engine, Ansible and Openconfig, and the Ansible ML2 plugin for Openstack.
NFD 18 – Day 1 Highlights – IP Infusion and Broadcom
Nicola Arnoldi highlights one of his favorite presentations from Network Field Day, the joint presentation from IP Infusion, Edgecore, and Broadcom. He says that these three have put together the knowledge and product to make everyone feel safe with disaggregation.
Networking Field Day 18 wrap-up
Nicola Arnoldi ends his Networking Field Day 18 experience by mentioning the presenting sponsors that caught his attention as well as the great people he was thrilled to finally meet.
Networking Field Day @ Cisco Live
Make sure you’re following Nicola Arnoldi for all of his updates out of Tech Field Day Extra from Cisco Live Europe. It’s his first Field Day experience, so we’re looking forward to the new perspective!
My first day at Tech Field Days Extra @ Cisco Live 2018
In this post, Nicola Arnoldi shares some thoughts from Cisco Live Europe, including his first Tech Field Day Extra experience. During the presentation, Nicola got a look at Cisco’s multicloud strategy, their network assurance engine, and Tetration. That’s a lot of deep dives for the first day, but Nicola does a good job of sorting through the fire hose of information in the post.
